The Sports Diversity Movement

Sports have always brought people together and
contrary to a popular belief that still persists today, LGBTQ+ individuals can
and DO play sports! But for early LGBTQ+ athletes, that path to inclusion,
equality and acceptance wasn’t a straight-forward one. However, in the 1970s thanks
to the Stonewall Riots in 1969 and the publication of Patricia Nell Warren’s
groundbreaking book, “The Front Runner” in 1974, more gay people were willing
to come together to play on gay teams with people they knew, keeping them all safe
from being outed.

What started with local pickup games began to grow when athletes looked for some competition from teams in neighboring gay sports communities. As this began to spread by word of mouth, tournaments began to get larger and add some fun events where gay athletes could socialize openly in a safe environment. As a result, national and international gay sports organizations began to form.

You can see below that these important national
and international LGBTQ+ sports organizations and sports advocacy groups started
to grow in the 70s and then took off in the 80s, 90s and the early 2000s as it
became safer for predominantly recreational athletes to come out.

Realizing there was little coverage of gay
sports by the media, Compete Magazine was formed by two LGBTQ+ athletes to
correct that. And knowing that the key to acceptance is visibility, the
magazine not only reported on various LGBTQ+ sports tournaments, it was committed
to tell the stories of individual athletes, their teams and organizations. The
grid below shows how the magazine grew with this new and exciting movement
toward sports diversity.

Compete
Magazine’s Evolution

2006

Eric Carlyle and David Riach participate in
International Gay Rugby’s Bingham Cup in New York; agree to start a magazine
focused on covering LGBTQ+ sports

Media Out Loud is formed in Tempe, Arizona
to publish Sports Out Loud magazine

2007

Sports Out Loud launched at Phoenix Pride

Sports Out Loud garners nationwide media
attention causing so much traffic its official online subscription page goes
down for 12 hours

Carlyle and Riach claim runner-up in Planet
Out’s “Entrepreneur of the Year” contest

2008

Sports Out Loud announces first-ever Sports
Out Loud “Athlete of the Year” contest

The movement really began to grow as more
ally (straight) athletes started to rethink their stereotypes of gay athletes as
weak “sissies” they’d once bullied on the school playground – these were real
athletes who actually played at the same high competitive level they were used
to. A growing number of allies wanted to play on their local gay teams: some
for their willingness to promote sports diversity but some just because they had
more fun on LGBTQ+ teams. Once their gay teammates became visible, the walls
came down for allies – their gay counterparts became … just people.

Visibility of Pro Players Coming Out

While all this was
slowly changing on a recreational level, it wasn’t until some professional
players came out as gay that caused the public to pay attention. Sadly, some early
players were outed in salacious articles, but a number of players who came out
after retiring from the NFL, NBA and MLB wrote books or did TV interviews
detailing the pain and suffering being closeted had caused them.

“I’m a 34-year-old NBA center. I’m black. And I’m gay. … No one wants to live in fear. I’ve always been scared of saying the wrong thing. … It takes an enormous amount of energy to guard such a big secret. I’ve endured years of misery and gone to enormous lengths to live a lie.”– Jason Collins, Sports Illustrated, April 29, 2013

Any movement grows as its mission begins to
resonate with people. As the public began to see professional athletes as people
they had cheered for and obsessed over in a new light, things actually did
begin to get better. There has never been a “Stonewall Uprising” moment that
has allowed LGBTQ+ athletes to feel safe and comfortable coming out en masse.
But looking at the graph below you can see that 2013, the year Jason Collins
came out and received both public and private support for his courageous
decision, the list of out athletes began to grow, many of them becoming vocal
advocates for change and acceptance.

It’s 50 years of Pride; pride for progress we’ve made in changing the hearts and minds of what I like to call Team Human Race. Let’s go have fun for Pride – be outrageous, wear glitter, dance till your booty drops off! But remember what President Obama said, “That we are stronger together. That out of many, we are one.”